I will begin my review by stating its main conclusions.
These are that Kevin Carson
has written one of the most significant books the
libertarian movement has seen in many years. I do not agree with everything he
says here. I do not suppose any libertarian will unreservedly
accept what is said. Even so, I doubt if there is a libertarian who can read
this book and not, in some degree, have his vision of a free society enriched
and even transformed by it.

Summarising an argument that is worked out over more than
six hundred pages is not easy. However, Mr Carson begins by observing that,
while economic theory seeks to analyse the behaviour of individuals and small
groups within a market system, the economic reality is a world dominated by
large corporations within which prices are largely administered and there is an
absence of competition.

He asks why this should be so. Why is there so much
substitution of hierarchy for individual contracts? The standard answer,
provided by Ronald Coase,
among others, is that large firms are more efficient
than small firms. The further the division of labour is carried, the larger the
potential economies of scale. In an open market, however, the division of labour
involves transaction coststhese being the costs of negotiating exchanges
between many different suppliers of goods and services. Within a firm, these
costs are not abolished, but are much reduced. Therefore, a firm will expand to
the point where the cost of organising one more transaction within itself is
equal to the cost of letting that transaction be made on the open market.

According to this analysis, firms grow large so far as
their lower internal transaction costs make them more efficient than their
smaller competitors. And there is an obvious temptation to regard size in a
market economy as evidence of greater efficiency.

Against this analysis and its conclusions, Mr Carson argues
that the point at which internal transaction costs become equal to the costs of
transactions via the market has been artificially raised by state
intervention. There are few objective benefits in size. Lowest long run average
cost is often achieved by rather small scale production methods. There is little
evidence that large factories are more efficient than small factories. There is
little evidence that large firms are more innovative than small firms. Anyone
who looks inside a large firm will see information and management and resource
allocation problems similar to those described by
Hayek and
von Mises in their
work on socialist calculation.

For two hundred years, economists have been content to
repeat and elaborate on the example of the
pin factory
described by Adam Smithin which the operations of making a pin are divided
among many workers, thereby raising average output. In fact, these efficiencies
can be realised just as easily by dividing the operations so that individual
workers perform them one after the other.

If large firms predominate, it is not because they are the
outcome of free market forces. Rather, they are called into being by systematic
distortions of the market that amount to a subsidy on size. These distortions
include the following:

First, there is subsidised transport and
communication infrastructure. According to Mr Carson,

[i]t's... important to remember that whatever reductions in
unit production cost results from internal economies of large-scale production
is to some extent offset by the dis-economies of large-scale
distribution.[p.34]

The British and American railway networks, for example,
were built in the nineteenth century by private companies. However, investment
was only made profitable by compulsory purchase laws, or actual grants of land.
Without this help, the returns on investmentnever very exciting in any event
would in at least most cases have been negative. Once built, though, the
railways in both countries enabled the growth of national wholesale and retail
markets that could now be served by large firms. The modern road networks were
mostly paid for out of taxes, or with loans services by the taxpayers. They did
for the concentration of enterprise in the twentieth century what the railways
had done in the nineteenth. Distribution costs have thereby been externalised on
other users or on the taxpayers.

Again, there is the building of ports and blue water naval
defences and the forced opening of foreign markets. Without the very costly work
of the British and American navies over the past few hundred years, it would not
have become so cheap and convenient to carry goods about the worlda carrying
trade that also widens markets and thereby subsidises the emergence of the large
firms best able to benefit. There are foreign policies that make other countries
more stable markets for large firms. How the Americans organised their southern
neighbours for the convenience of the United Fruit Company needs no more than a
mention. There is also the hugely expensive oil-based Middle Eastern policies of
the British and American Governments during the past hundred years. Even with
all the taxes heaped on it, petrol may have been made far cheaper than it would
have been in the absence of government intervention. Perhaps, indeed, it is the
artificial cheapness of oil that has shaped the whole structure of our
civilisation by crowding out smaller scale alternatives.

It may be argued that subsidising transport tends to create
large positive externalities. Perhaps it does. Nevertheless, the most visible
benefitsbeing those enjoyed by large firmshave always been smaller than
the full costs. As Mr Carson says,

If production on the scale promoted by infrastructure
subsidies were actually efficient enough to compensate for real
distribution costs, the manufacturers would have presented enough effective
demand for such long-distance shipping at actual costs to pay for it without
government intervention. ...[a]n apparent 'efficiency' that presents a positive
ledger balance only by shifting and concealing real costs, is really no
'efficiency' at all. Costs can be shifted, but they cannot be destroyed.[p.69]

The same can be said of every communications network from
national post offices to the Internet. They widen markets at far less than full
cost to those who benefit from it. In particular, the satellite-based telephone
and Internet revolution of the past few decades has allowed production and
distribution right across the world to be organised from a single location.

Second, there are patents and copyrights. In a
natural orderthat is, in a society without a stateproperty rights in
intangible items would be at least difficult to have recognised. The reason is
that, while only one person can possess my notebook computerand to take it
away from me would be an obvious injustice, easily prevented or rectifiedthis
review can be reproduced without limit. Similarly, the computer itself can be
copied. In neither case is anyone deprived of his own possession. Intellectual
property rights are essentially artificial property rights. They do not derive
from scarcity, but from the creation of scarcity. They are essentially grants of
monopoly privilege. They can only be created by the State. They can only be
enforced by limiting what people can do with physical objects they have bought.

The claim that rights to intellectual property encourage
the creation of intellectual property is unfounded. There is much evidence that
firms would continue to develop new products in the absence of patent
protection. There are many other ways of rewarding artistic creation than
copyright. What does seem to be the case, however, is that patents are routinely
used to hinder innovation; and the sharing of patents between large firms has
the effect of shutting smaller competitors out of the market. And payments for
the use of intellectual property enter very heavily into the supply cost of
nearly all goods and services. This is particularly the case with
pharmaceuticals, where patents serve less to encourage innovation than to
increase prices to dozens of times their natural level.

Third, there is the cartelisation of costs brought
about by laws prescribing minimum standards of product quality or of fair
trading or of payment and treatment of workers. When, for example, cigarette
manufacturers are stopped from advertising, there is the same effect on cost and
profit as if the companies had agreed among themselves to stop advertising. Mr
Carson says:

A regulation, in essence, is a state-enforced cartel in
which the members agree to cease competition in a particular area of quality or
safety, and instead agree on a uniform standard which they establish through the
state. And unlike private cartels, which are unstable, no member can seek an
advantage by defecting.[p.80]

Taxes have a similar effect. Value added tax, for example,
is applied whenever money changes hands between businessesabove a low
turnover threshold, that is. The effect of this is to raise the costs of
transactions via the market, without touching those taking place within a
firm.

Fourth, there are the incorporation laws. These
allow a firm to be defined as an artificial person, with most of the civil
rights and obligations of a natural person. One of these obligations is the same
unlimited liability for debt as a sole trader has. However, while the firm has
unlimited liability, the liability of its owners is limited to the extent of
their investment. This privilege alone allows incorporated firms to raise large
amounts of capital on the financial markets. Yet, while the shareholders
theoretically own them, such firms in practice are the property of their
managers, who feel none of the moral responsibility that comes with ownership.

Unless unlucky or badly run, incorporated firms can last
forever, and can grow bigger and bigger and more bureaucratic in their
organisation. It is no argument that incorporation might still be
possible in a stateless society. It probably would not. Whatever the case,
incorporation laws enable far more incorporation than would take place where
every attempt required costly and time-consuming negotiation and advertising.

By these and other means, Mr Carson says, size of business
organisation has been systematically encouraged by the State. Now, those who
gain from such enlargement have not been passive or accidental beneficiaries.
This is not a matter of "socialist" laws made by economic illiterates that have
then worked to the advantage of big business. The world in which we live has
been deliberately shaped over the past few hundred years or more by plutocratic
elites that have wanted stable markets and docile workers and suppliers.
These elites comprise the managerial and rentier classes, politicians and
bureaucrats, and the various intellectuals who propagate the ideologies that
justify the ruling class as a whole. The justifying ideologies shift over time.
But the overall project has been one of centralising economic and political
power so that wealth can be shifted upward from those who produce to those who
consume.

In this state of affairs, the construction of welfare
systems should not be seen as radical attacks from outside, but as an essential
support of the established order. The growth of large firms as the dominant
business unit has required the virtual conscription of millions of people into
hierarchical structures, with the suppressionor at least the discouragement
of their individuality. Apart from regular cash payments, the reward for an
almost military deference to authority has been promises of job security and
paid holidays and pensions and healthcare. In America, this was made into a
cartelised cost on big business. In England and most other countries, it was
directly assumed by the State.

We do not live in anything approaching a market order. The
state of affairs in which we live is best described as a kinder, gentler
feudalism. Those at the top possess fabulous, almost risk free wealth. Nearly
everyone else is attached, in extended patterns of fealty, to large
organisationsbig business firms, state bureaucracies, welfare services, and
the like.

This being said, if our modern feudalism is nicer than the
old, it is growing nastier over time. plutocratic social democracy worked so
long as its inefficiencies could be covered with subsidies from the taxpayers
and the exploitation of consumers, and so long as the workers were broadly
content with the bribes given to keep them quiet. More recently, Mr Carson says,
the crises of the systemoverproduction of certain commodities, waste of
natural resources, inability to maintain control outside the West, rising
discontent within the West, and so forthhave begun to dwarf any means of
overcoming them. The response has been a rearrangement of the sticks and
carrots. Mr Carson says:

The elites who run our state capitalist economy made a
strategic decision in the 1970s, to cap real wages and transfer all productivity
increases into reinvestment, dividends, or CEO salaries. So while real wages
have remained for thirty years, the wealth of the top few percent of the
population has exploded astronomically.... To impose this policy on society,
obviously required increasing authoritarianism in all aspects of social
life.[p.257]

Because the system is unstable, it may collapse by itself.
Or it may require an external push. Whatever the case, Mr Carson hopes for a
future world in which statist privilege of all kinds will have been abolished,
and in which all costs of economic activity will have been internalised. Such a
world, he thinks, will be mostly of small communities, in which food and energy
and manufactured goods will be produced and consumed close to market, and in
which small-scaleoften rather simpletechnology will be the rule. Ordinary
people, whether by themselves or in free combinations, will look after their own
healthcare and welfare and will arrange for the education of their children.

As said, this is a long book, and a full summary of its
argument would fill a much longer review article than mine. But this is, I
think, the essence of what Mr Carson is arguing. And rather than elaborate on
this essence, I think it would be more useful to explain what I find so
remarkable about it. What is there to justify the praise that I gave in my first
paragraph?

One answerurged on me by a friend who calls himself an
anarcho-communistmight be that Mr Carson has written the definitive
refutation of free market libertarianism. To anyone who has read not more than a
few pages of his work, this is a superficially persuasive opinion. Mr Carson
does not regard himself as a free market libertarian as this term is generally
understood. He says instead:

I belong to the general current of the Left so beautifully
described by the editors of Radical Technology ('the "recessive left" of
anarchists, utopians and visionaries, which tends only to manifest itself when
dominant genes like Lenin or Harold Wilson are off doing something else').
"[p.1]

He does also, I admit, sneer many times at what he calls
"vulgar libertarians"these being people who defend plutocratic privilege as
if it were a close approximation to a free market order. I also admit there are
such people. The Internet is crawling with people who call themselves
libertarians, and who defend the right of a drug company to sell its products in
different markets at different prices, and to use the power of the State to
suppress private arbitrage between these markets.
Ayn Rand andwithout her own
reservationsher followers worship big business as the highest possible stage
of human development. So far as they accept that there is a parasite class, this
is the poor and unsuccessful who act via the politicians they have been
unwisely allowed to elect to office. The
Chicago libertarians for the most part
seem to define a free market as little more than "Tesco/Walmart minus the
State". They readily accept that there are groups benefiting from state action,
but do not accept the existence of a "ruling class". And they deny that big
business forms part of a system that is inherently exploitative. It might be
argued that Mr Carson is attacking free market libertarians for hypocrisy.

But this is not his intention, and I think it would be
regrettable if his book were to be regarded as an attack. He also says:

I embrace both the free market and the socialist
libertarian camps.... I write from the perspective of individualist anarchism, as
set forth by William B. Greene and Benjamin Tucker among others, and as I
attempted to update it for the twenty-first century.[p.1]

For all his sneering at the "vulgar libertarians", Mr
Carson's analysis proceeds much of the timeand with full awareness and
acknowledgementalong the same lines as that of
Murray Rothbard and of other
free market libertarian critics of plutocracy. Almost every page of this book
and of all else he has written shows and admits the influence of the Austrian
school of free market economics. The Index of this book contains thirty eight
references to Rothbardquotations from his works or generally favourable
comments on them. I do not think this famous passage is among those quoted:

Every element in the New Deal program: central planning,
creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture,
inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion
of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and
ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two
decades. And this program, with its privileging of various big business
interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of
socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the
proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all
with socialism-communism but with fascism, or socialism-of-the-right, a kinship
which many big businessmen of the twenties expressed openly in their yearning
for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they
could control.[Murray Rothbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty
(1965), available at
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard33.html]

Even if not quoted, though, the passage shows an obvious
similarity of approach. Or we can take a passage from
Sheldon Richman that is
quoted:

Many self-styled defenders of the free market
misunderstand the American system. They believe that under a thin layer of
government intervention lies the system they cherish. All we need to do is
scrape away that layer, and glorious capitalism will be restored.

They couldn't be more wrong. There is no thin layer of
intervention. Government has intruded deeply into economic activity from the
beginning, most particularly in banking and finance, which is by nature at the center of any economy. The web of privilege and control is pervasive, touching
all parts of the economy. Moreover, this intervention was never imposed on
bankers, financiers, and the rest of the business elite. It was welcomedto be
more precise, it was invited and sponsored by them. Free enterprise, risk, and
loss were for the little guy. Partnership with the state was for the elite. That
partnership meant favoritism and protection from competition. It meant exemption
from market discipline and exploitation of taxpayers, consumers, and
workers.[Sheldon Richman, The Corporate State Wins (2008), available at
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0810b.asp]

Of course, written in 2008, this may show the influence
of Mr Carson rather than any influence on him. But there can be no
doubt that Organization Theory is a book written by a free market
libertarian of sortsand is a book that contains much of value to the free
market libertarian analysis of actually existing capitalism. Its value lies in
three areas. First, it carries the analysis of how plutocracy operates to a
deeper radicalism than can be found in much of Rothbard and his circle. Second,
he provides an overpowering weight of evidence for this analysisevidence, I
grant, of not always the highest value. Third, he writes from a perspective not
often understood by free market libertarians.

I will avoid discussing his views of incorporation, as this
is already an emerging consensus within free market libertarianism. I have
written something on this myself, and my opinionthat the joint stock limited
liability corporation is an unnatural and an undesirable developmentis one
that I formed before reading Mr Carson, even if this opinion has been
strengthened by reading him. What did come new to me was his analysis of how
distortions in the transport market tend to subsidise the growth of big
business. It is some while since I read Rothbard with close attention, but I do
not think he regarded these subsidies as of central importance.
Hans-Hermann
Hoppe does mention them somewhere in passing as more instances of coerced
association. But I think Mr Carson is the first to treat them as of central
importance. And once properly understood, they can be used to remove one of the
main disputes between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives, among
others.

For the better part of two centuries, conservatives have
been sceptical of free trade because of its alleged tendency to destroy local
patterns of enterprise and the relationships deriving from these. Their
complaint has been that the removal of tariffs has tended to deprive large
numbers of peopleespecially the native working classesof any reasonable
market for their services. Against this, libertarians have used the formally
irrefutable logic of comparative advantage. If it is cheaper to import wheat or
steel from abroad, they have argued, it is economically inefficient and a
violation of rights to force people to buy these things from native suppliers.

While irrefutable, however, the theory of
comparative cost
is usually argued on the assumption of zero transport costs. Once these are
taken into account, extended foreign trade may become far less profitable.
Richard Cobden once observed that British agriculture was already protected by
the high cost of shipping corn from Russia. What has happened since then is the
growth of a vast international transport system built or subsidised by the
taxpayers. This has brought down transport costs paid at the point of use and
enabled the growth of unnaturally large patterns of international trade.

I live in one of the main apple growing regions of England.
Even in the autumn, I can go into my local supermarket and find apples on sale
from South Africa, from Chile, and even from China. When I drive home every
summer from Slovakia, I find myself stuck on the smaller German motorways behind
lorries carrying food from Turkey. How much of this trade would make economic
sense if price in the shops reflected the full cost of transport? How much would
there be if the motorways had not been built by the State, with powers of
compulsory purchase and with grants of immunity against tort for pollution? How
much would there be if transport companies had to pay the full cost of the wear
their lorries made on the roads? How much would there be if the costs of
stabilising the Middle East were reflected in the price of commercial diesel?

Adam Smith pointed out that grapes could be grown in
Scotland, but that the opportunity costs made this a foolish use of resources.
Perhaps it is. But perhaps if the full costs of production and transport entered
into price, might it not make better sense to grow our own exotic fruits
especially given our more advanced agricultural techniques? Does it make real
economic sense to import every consumer good imaginable from China and the Far
East? Would it not be cheaper, in the absence of distortions, to buy television
sets from a factory in our home town? Would it not be cheaper to spend more on
maintaining most consumer durables than on replacing them every few years?

We are accustomed to laugh at ill-informed attacks on
Ricardo and the other
economists of foreign trade. But perhaps these attacks do
contain factual truths that our own assumptions about trade theory prevent us
from understanding. Perhaps if we were to take account of real transport costs,
this whole dispute might be seen as another dialogue of the deaf.

The longest section of Organization Theory is
contained under the heading "Systemic Effects of Centralization and Excessive
Organizational Size". This is made up of observations that strike me for the
most part as common senseand even common knowledgebut that I have not
before seen brought together into a structure of analysis. Indeed, though I did
teach management theory for several years, its overall theme was a revelation to
me. As said, many libertarians recognise that big business is inherently
exploitative. But we have also assumed that it is reasonably productive within
its own terms. It is not. As already mentioned, Mr Carson believes that large
firms show many of the weaknesses long since indentified in centrally-planned
economies. He says:

Individual human beings make optimal decisions only when
they internalize the costs and benefits of their own decisions. The larger the
organization, the more the authority to make decisions is separated both from
the negative consequences and from the direct knowledge of the results. And in a
hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of those
at the top are borne by the people who are actually doing the work. The direct
producers, who know what's going on and experience directly the consequences of
decisions, have no direct control of those decisions.[p.193]

The results of this are an obsession at the top with
targets that can be measured and an indifference to local understandings of how
work may best be done. Profitability crises are managed by thinly-veiled
attempts to make people work harder for less, by "downsizings" that cut
measurable costs while destroying intangible patterns of human capital, greater
incentives to management to restore profitability, and an interest in fad
management theories that talk of "empowerment" and decentralised control, but
are just shifts in legitimising ideology to jolly the workers along.

Strikes and other forms of industrial action should not be
seen as mindless wrecking, or attacks on property or violations of contract.
Rather, they are often attempts by the workers to claw back some of the humanity
stolen by them. Nor can what is often the standard libertarian analysis of free
contracting be used to justify the increasing authoritarianism of big business.
Mr Carson looks at the increasing attempts to control what workers do in their
own time:

Vulgar libertarians
like to stress that, 'in a free market,' workers are free to take their labor
elsewhere if they don't like their working conditions. And many free market
libertarians respond with just that advicefrequently in quite indignant
termsin response to workers' complaints about their employers. Every complaint
about employers' restrictions on their employees' freedom of speech and
association outside of work is met with the response: 'Well, nobody's forcing
you to work there.'

Well, yes and no. We market anarchists do not propose the imposition of any
external constraint on what terms an employer can set as a condition of employment.
The question is not whether the state should permit employers to set such
conditions, but what kind of a market allows it?

Just how godawful do the other 'options' have to be before somebody's
desperate enough to take a job, and hold onto it like grim death, under
conditions of stagnant pay, where (thanks to downsizing and speedups)
they're doing their own work plus that of a former coworker?

But never mind those things. How do things get to the point where people
are lined up to compete for jobs where they can be forbidden to associate
with coworkers away from work, where even squalid, low-paying retail jobs
can involve being on-call 24/7, where employees can't attend political
meetings without keeping an eye out for an informer, or can't blog under
their own names without living in fear that they're a websearch away from
termination?[pp.402-03]

This analysis shades into a perspective on libertarianism
that I, for one, had never really considered before. I came to libertarianism by
reading Whigs like
Macaulay and classical liberals like
John Stuart Mill and
Herbert Spencer. The common tendency of these writers is to view society from
fairly close to the top. Liberty is good, they argue at least impliedly, because
it means that well-educated middle class people get left alone to live as they
please. My libertarian friends were mostly brought over by reading American
writers of the twentieth century. Our common opponents have been socialist
intellectuals who cry up the plight of the working man as an excuse for
expanding state power. Those of us who are English and have reached middle age
remember the crises of the 1970s, in which trade union activists seemed to be
trying for a pro-Soviet revolution. There is for us a natural identity between
property and liberty. And we have been inclined by reading and experience to
identify the defence of property with defence of the propertied classes. If we
have adopted the more radical approach of Murray Rothbard, it has been to
complain at how the plutocratic elites have plundered middle class people
like ourselves. Something most of us have never considered other than in passing
is the position of those at the bottomthe semi-skilled and unskilled working
classes.

Several years ago, I sat down to dinner with David Carr,
who is the Legal Affairs Spokesman for the Libertarian Alliance. We discussed at
some length what sort of outreach we could develop for those at the bottom.
Libertarianism, I said, offered lower taxes to all. So what? David asked. A
checkout assistant in Tesco pays little tax, and probably gains on balance from
the welfare state. So what about freedom of thought and speech? he went on.
These people are not very intellectual. And what of the right to live as they
choose? They can already do that. Whatever taxes and restrictions there might be
on cigarettes and drink and other recreational drugs, these do not really apply
to anyone who is not worried about the occasional brush with the law. Granted
non-libertarian political systems, if they turn totalitarian, murder large
numbers of people, and do not usually discriminate by class. But the chance that
England will fall under a Stalin or a Pol Pot are not worth mentioning. Granted
the abolition or hampering of markets means that goods are allocated more on
the basis of connections than of price. But the poor lack both connections and
money. They are made worse offbut not often in ways they can be brought to
consider. Libertarianism is a fine ideology for the productive middle classes
and those with the energy and ambition to rise into them. But what about the
workers? Our conclusion was to find some way of preaching the benefits of
"trickle down"that
the lower classes benefit from how their betters use their
freedomand to hope that some non-libertarian party might wrap up a certain
amount of libertarian policy in complaints about the European Union and
mass-immigration.

Our discussion was, I must say, a little more sophisticated
than that. But the question of how to preach libertarianism outside the middle
classes did not get much further than that. Shortly after this, I discovered the
work of Kevin Carson, and my view of the question was transformed. His present
book draws his earlier work together into one place and reinforces that
transformation. The problem with all those patronising Labour apparatchiks and
the scum in donkey jackets selling their newspapers outside Underground stations
is their prescription. Their diagnosis that ordinary working people are
exploited in a system that transfers wealth upwards is broadly correct.

People at the bottom suffer from plutocratic state
capitalism because it robs them of the dignity that comes of being respectably
poorthat is, being securely in control of their own lives. It raises the
price of all goods and services to them. It places direction of their lives into
the hands of credentialed elites. It herds them into large state or
formally private organisations and subjects them to irrational and authoritarian
control of their working lives. It forces them to live in disgusting conditions
by preventing them from taking over unused land and building their own homes
according to their abilities.

But "[c]onsider" says Mr Carson,

the process of running a small, informal
brew pub or restaurant out of your home, under a genuine free market regime.
Buying a brewing kettle and a few small fermenting tanks for your basement,
using a few tables in an extra room as a public restaurant area, etc., would
require at most a bank loan for a few thousand dollars. And with that capital
outlay, you could probably service the debt with the margin from a few customers
a week. A modest level of business on evenings and weekends, probably drawn from
among your existing circle of acquaintances, would enable you to initially shift
some of your working hours from wage labor to work in the restaurant, with the
possibility of gradually phasing out wage labor altogether or scaling back to
part time, as you built up a customer base. In this and many other lines of
business, the minimal entry costs and capital outlay mean that the minimum
turnover required to pay the overhead and stay in business would be quite
modest. In that case, a lot more people would be able to start small businesses
for supplementary income and gradually shift some of their wage work to self
employment, with minimal risk or sunk costs.[p.549]

This does not talkas many libertarians do when
considering small businessesabout something that might turn its owner into a
millionaire. It talks instead about micro-businesses that will never make anyone
rich, but will simply make their owners independent of a system that turns them
into serfs and bribes them with welfare handouts into becoming electoral fodder
for the farce that is plutocratic social democracy. However, all this is
presently illegal. There are taxes and regulations that exclude this sort of
micro-business. The benefit that libertarianism holds out to the Tesco checkout
assistant is not lower taxes on her pitiful and already mostly untaxed salary,
but the chance not to work for Tesco.

Let me now turn from those areas where I completely agree
with Mr Carson to those where I may disagree in principle, but am inclined to
agree in practice. I am not sure if I agree with his opinions on land ownership.
Certainly, I have no objection to expropriating South American latifundia
and dividing these among the peasants who work them. But these are the product
of obvious and usually recent theft overseen by the State. I am less sure about
the illegitimacy of the rental income I derive from a second property. I am less
sure about the income I hope one day to derive from owning a number of
commercial properties. On the other hand, big landowners in England at least are
part of the plutocratic ruling class. Most agricultural land here still seems to
be owned by the old aristocracyeven if ownership is concealed by trusts and
other corporate forms. This ownership prevents the emergence of a
self-sufficient farming class. Perhaps there is a case for some confinement of
property rights in land to what an owner can reasonably use for himself.

I am also divided on some intellectual property rights. I
accept that patents are illegitimate. But copyrights are another matter. I own
several property rights from which I do hope to grow rather rich, andeven
discounting my personal interestsI think it would be unjust to deprive
writers and composers of their royalties. I know that there are other systems of
reward that do not rely on grants of monopoly privilege, and these may become
more important as the enforcement of copyright grows technically more difficult.
For the moment, though, I do look forward to my royalty cheques and do not
regard them as ill-gotten.

On the other hand, I accept that copyright laws serve
mostly to enrich media companies that are part of the ruling class. The main
function of these companies is to brainwash us into accepting the system in
which we live, or to moronise us into not being able to notice how we are
tyrannised over and exploited. I am not sure.

I am more decided about Mr Carson's acceptance of the
environmentalist claims. I do not believe that we are running out of natural
resources. I certainly do not think, as Mr Carson insists, that we are living in
the age of "peak oil"that
"the greatest sources of concentrated energy [i.e.,
fossil fuels] are almost certainly reaching their peak[p.432], and that we
shall soon see a decline in their extraction. I will not bother in what is
already a long review with digressing on a reply to this claim. I simply do not
believe it. That being said, I do like his vision of a decentralised world where
energy needs are met locally or in the home. We have lived for around two
centuries now in a civilisation powered by oil and coal and gas. WE have got
most of our oil from a Middle East that we have had to colonise and generally
turn upside down. One cost of our dependence on oil has been the grown of giant
oil companies that are leading members of the plutocratic ruling class. Another
cost has been radical Islam. However generated, our energy needs have been met
by vast, centralised distribution networks over which we as individual have no
control, and which encourage us into attitudes of passive reliance on the ruling
class.

Yet there are alternative ways of generating and
distributing energy. At the moment, these are more expensive than those already
established. This is partly because most of the alternatives are not very good
in themselvesbut also because we have had generations of effort put into
making the best of moving large amount of oil around the planet, or distributing
electricity and gas via national networks. There is no reason to suppose
that these alternatives should always be a joke. That is why I am often unsure
about the green movement. So far as it wants to shout down industrial
civilisation and return us to the long preceding age when energy consumption was
minimal, I stand happily beside the most fanatical and vexatious Randroid. So
far as it might be useful to bringing about a world in which energy consumption
can rise without limitbut without state-built or state-controlled energy
networksI am inclined to put on a straight face and nod hopefully over talk
of wind turbines and solar cells.

Let me now conclude with one purely negative criticism of
Mr Carson. I come back to his denigration of the "vulgar libertarians". Since I
probably do not qualify as one of these according to his definitionsand
probably never have doneI hope my defence will not be seen as self-serving
apologetic. But what have these people said that is so absolutely reprehensible?
They have defended the most fantastically productive economic system that has
ever been extensively tried. If, judged by the strict standards applied by Mr
Carsonstandards that I largely acceptthis system is lacking. Compared with
any other, it is barely the wrong side of heaven itself. It is exploitative at
home. Say what other system has not been. It is nakedly exploitative in outlying
regions. Again, say what other system has not been. It is riddled with
irrationalities and waste of human and material resources. I repeat the
challenge. We have lived under something like our present system for at least
one centuryperhaps two or more. Mr Carson is still free to write up and
publish his devastating attack on it; and I am free to give it a more or less
enthusiastic review. If the "vulgar libertarians" have given any intellectual
support that has enabled the system to survive, they still rank among the
benefactors of mankind.

But this leads into issues far removed from this review. Mr Carson has written
a very long book. Even so, it is filled with arguments and insights that, I repeat,
will enrich and transform the vision of a free society held by anyone who reads it.
Despite what I see as its occasional faults, I heartily recommend it.